"Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing" (PDF)

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46 Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing | The New Digital Marketing Landscape Recruiting Brand Advocates With more and more young people creating their own online “user-generated content,” marketers are encouraging them to “co-create” and promote commercials for their favorite brands. 190 What better way to engage consumers with brands than to have them create the advertising themselves? 191 The new buzzwords in the industry are “consumer-generated” or “brand-generated” media. In marketing circles, the two terms are often used interchangeably, suggesting an intentional blurring of roles. The strategy is designed to foster powerful emotional connections between consumers and products, tap into a stable of young creative talent willing to offer their services for free, and produce a new generation of “brand advocates.” Food and beverage companies are actively engaged in a variety of user-generated media campaigns: • For the 2007 Super Bowl, Pepsi’s Frito-Lay division urged consumers to produce their own commercial spots for Doritos tortilla chips and submit them online in the “Doritos Smash the Super Bowl Contest.” In addition to a chance at a firstplace airing during the mega sports TV event, participants competed for the five finalist spots, which were made available online at Crashthesuperbowl.com and on YouTube and other online video sites. More than a thousand video ads were submitted, with “thousands of fans” voting for their favorites. One of the finalists reported that his video was viewed 200,000 times at the Yahoo! website, with the winning entry attracting nearly 400,000 views. 192 • Fight for the Flavor (FftF) is part of the larger Doritos Snack Strong Productions site (http://www.doritos.com/, which also includes the “Crash the Super Bowl” user-made commercial archive and the “Flavor Lab” product gallery). FftF serves, in a sense, as an online, animated equivalent of a focus group, in which users interact with dueling bags of Doritos (Wild White Nacho vs. Smokin’ Cheddar BBQ) to determine which of the two new flavors should be brought to market: “Cast your vote. Win delicious prizes. Shame opponents in an online match of no-holds-barred ultimate fighting.” Registered users (who must submit their name, e-mail and postal addresses, and phone number) can “login to the multi-player arena and take on other flavor fighters to earn a spot on the leaderboard.” They are also eligible to cast votes (either online or via mobile phone text messages) for their flavor preference and are eligible to win one of ten grand prizes (a year’s supply of Doritos) or one of five thousand first prizes (Doritos T-shirt). 193 • Wendy’s launched a contest on the youth site Bolt.com, inviting teens to contribute “tracks to a song in progress,” as part of an online “audition” for performing spots with the “Bolt Band.” 194 • At Viacom’s online teen channel, “the N,” visitors can use the website’s “Video Mixer” to create their own ads for Skittles and email them to their friends. “We view this as one of the most innovative digital media products that a major media company has launched on the Internet,” commented an industry analyst. 195
Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing | The New Digital Marketing Landscape • At General Mills’ Millsberry.com website, children are encouraged to make the “best movie” about “Lucky” (of Lucky Charms) and then vote for the winning video. The site provides a pre-branded kit of settings and spokescharacters, making it easy to combine them into a personalized commercial. 196 • Pizza Hut launched a recent contest inviting pizza enthusiasts to create a short video “demonstrating their devotion to Pizza Hut Pizza” and showing why they should earn the title of “Honorary Vice President of Pizza.” Contestants were encouraged to engage in a variety of creative acts to show their loyalty to the brand, such as “decorating their room with Pizza Hut memorabilia.” Entrants submitted their videos on YouTube, ensuring they would be seen by thousands of viewers, whether they won or not. 197 • With a code from a 20-oz bottle of Sprite, visitors to the Lebron 2323 site were invited to “help create a theme song for LeBron James.” The site offered online audio and video mixing tools to enable young people to remix the audio track to a Sprite Sublymonal television spot featuring the NBA star. Add a viral element (“Promote your track on your social networking profile to get votes—the top vote getters get judged by LeBron James and our celebrity artists—Paul Wall & Al Fatz...”) and the promise of broad exposure (“The top 3 tracks get premiered in the new Sprite/LeBron TV spot during NBA All-Star 2007”), and Coca-Cola’s Sprite division enjoyed the support of thousands of volunteer online marketers. 198 While some industry observers have expressed concern over consumers gaining too much control and creating videos that may undermine, rather than enhance, a brand’s image, most marketers have figured out how to make the boom in user-generated content work for them. For example, the Coca-Cola Company initially played down the phenomenal success of the unauthorized viral video—viewed by millions on YouTube—in which Mentos candy is dropped into a Diet Coke, triggering a chemical explosion. Officials told The Wall Street Journal that while the video was “entertaining,” it didn’t “fit with the brand personality.” However, the company subsequently decided to proactively build consumer-generated content into its Coke.com site, tempering unfettered online expression with a carefully calculated campaign. “We give the structure, we try to give the guidance,” one official told IQ Interactive, “but we’re looking for consumers to fill it with content that’s relevant to them rather than us talking to them.” 199 In August 2006, the website began featuring a series of monthly challenges that encourage people around the world to create videos in response to a theme. The first challenge on the site, “The Essence of You,” asks, “If you could bottle the essence of you and share it with the world, what story would you tell?” Visitors can vote on each other’s work, and the winner is awarded about $5,000 worth of video equipment and editing software. “We’re bringing a global creative community together,” explained a Coke spokesperson. “It’s not just the U.S. creative teenagers uploading their videos. It’s going to be everyone around the world, and you’re going to see everybody’s [stuff].” 200 47
Page 1 and 2: Interactive Food & Beverage Marketi
Page 3: This report was funded in part by T
Page 7 and 8: Setting the Stage 7
Page 21 and 22: …an average visit to the McDonald
Page 23 and 24: Technology companies have created a
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Page 30 and 31: Digital technologies are…creating
Page 32 and 33: Increasingly, mobile users will be
Page 34 and 35: …Pepsi’s director of digital me
Page 36 and 37: Business models underlying youthori
Page 38 and 39: “On average, for a specific IMV,
Page 40 and 41: “[S]ometimes the marketing is so
Page 42 and 43: Since the beginning of the World Wi
Page 44 and 45: 44 Interactive Food & Beverage Mark
Page 48 and 49: By encouraging consumers to create
Page 52 and 53: [T]he speed with which a “brand o
Page 59 and 60: Creating a Healthy Media Environmen
Page 63 and 64: To the extent that marketing plays
Page 65 and 66: Food marketers can now target teens
Page 67: Industry selfregulation will only w
Page 70 and 71: 1 Institute of Medicine of the Nati
Page 72 and 73: 55 “Jack in the Box Branches into
Page 74 and 75: 107 According to NMS Communications
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Page 78 and 79: 207 Stanley, “Video Games;” Bet
Page 80 and 81: 255 Shields, “Nickelodeon Launche
Page 83 and 84: Appendix: Multicultural Marketing i
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Page 89 and 90: African Americans are more likely t
Page 91 and 92: “Pepsi has been a teen brand, and
Page 93 and 94: McDonald’s has been a leader in w
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Interactive Food & Beverage Marketi
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